When Lee was working, he was away for days at a time. Some days he phoned me constantly, texting me in between, asking how I was, wishing he was with me, asking what I was doing. Some days he clearly couldn’t use the phone at all and I was all alone.

Wednesday evening, heading home from work in the dark. I hadn’t heard from him since Saturday. I stopped at the supermarket and got myself some shopping for dinner. I was going to make a chicken casserole, keep some for tomorrow.

Sunday and Monday I’d spent most of the day checking my phone just in case he’d called. Tuesday I only checked it a few times. Today I’d hardly checked at all. I wondered if he was alright. As I browsed through the fruit and vegetables I found myself thinking back to how long he’d been away. What was the longest time he’d been away from me, since we met? A few days, a week, but usually no more than a day or two would go past without some contact. I’d sent him a text on Monday evening but I’d not had a reply. I tried to ring and the phone was switched off. This in itself wasn’t unusual; when he was working he often turned the phone off, or found himself somewhere where he couldn’t charge it up.

It felt strange, being without him. Despite how stifled I felt sometimes when he was with me, he made me feel safe at the same time. Now I was back to being alone, I felt exposed, insecure, vulnerable. In the supermarket I couldn’t help feeling that there was someone watching me.

By the time I’d got home, dumped all the shopping in the kitchen and turned some of the lights on, I felt better. There was a missed call on the home phone; the number was withheld. I wondered if it was Lee trying to call, but he would have called my mobile first. I made dinner and sang to myself, looking forward to a soak in the bath with a book. When it was all ready I grabbed cutlery from the drawer in the kitchen and sat on the sofa to eat.

If anything happened to Lee while he was at work, would I ever find out? Would I ever get to hear about it? He’d made it clear that none of the people he worked with knew anything about me. It was ‘better that way – safer’. What if he was hurt? What if he got into another fight, a bad one, and he ended up stabbed, or shot? Would I even know?

I washed up the dishes in the sink and dried them, still thinking about him, where he might be, what he might be doing. I put the knife and fork away in the drawer and something looked odd. The knives and forks had been swapped over in the drawer. I’d shoved the clean ones back in, and they were in the wrong place – one fork nestled in with the knives, one knife in with the forks.

They hadn’t been like that this morning. Or had they? I forced myself to remember making the toast. Where had I got the knife from? It must have been in the right place then or else I’d have been trying to spread my toast with a fork.

I grabbed handfuls of cutlery and swapped them back over.

I couldn’t understand what had happened. I went upstairs to run the bath and as soon as I turned on the bathroom light I saw it – the laundry basket had been moved from the left side of the sink to the right side. It looked odd straight away.

I moved it back.

Someone had been in here.

I went from room to room, looking for changes, looking for things that were different. It took me an hour to go through everything and when I’d finished I still wasn’t convinced that I’d done it properly. Was I going mad? Surely I couldn’t forget something like moving furniture around, or changing my cutlery drawer? And why would I even do something like that? The laundry basket didn’t even fit properly on the right side of the sink – there wasn’t enough room between it and the bath, it stuck out.

The question in my mind was not so much who had been in here – there were no signs that anyone had broken in, therefore whoever it was had a key, which meant it had to have been Lee. The question was more – why? Why would he come in here and just start moving things around?

I kept looking, in case somewhere there was a note explaining it, that maybe had fluttered down out of sight when he’d shut the front door behind him. There was no note.